Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  “License and registration,” he said.

  “Steven, I’m not in the mood. I’ve had a bad stretch.”

  “And that’s relevant how?”

  “You’re not really going to do this, are you?” Lyndon asked.

  Steven rested his palm on the butt of his holstered gun. “Do you want me to add Section 148, obstruction?” he said.

  He gave Lyndon a ticket not only for the taillight, but also for not wearing his seatbelt.

  It was seven when Lyndon got home. A northwest breeze was stiffening, and it was noticeably colder. Fall would arrive in earnest soon. In a matter of weeks, it would be time to start harvesting his Brussels sprouts.

  He entered the house through the mudroom. As usual, Bob was nowhere to be found, but Lyndon heard something odd inside—water running. Someone was taking a shower. Hesitantly he climbed the stairs, and as he reached the second floor, the valve to the shower squeaked shut. He stayed on the landing, unsure what to do next. The door to the bathroom was open, the light on, and he could hear the bather drawing back the shower curtain, toweling off, and running a brush through long hair, wet tips licking the air when the brush traveled past the ends.

  The person—a woman—came out of the bathroom and pivoted down the hallway toward the bedrooms, away from Lyndon. She was naked, Asian, lean and muscled, skin slick and water-beaded. Lyndon took a step forward, and the floorboard beneath his foot creaked. They both stopped moving, a tableau vivant, frozen in identical positions, one foot in front of the other. Then Lyndon watched the woman’s haunches and legs contract, and she whirled around, spinning twice in a spectacular fashion that was at once balletic and terrifying, and threw a roundhouse kick into his face. As he crashed against the wall and was going down to the floor, about to black out, he was cognizant of swallowing the temporary crown that had dislodged from his cracked molar—or what was now left of it.

  CHAPTER 2

  LING LING HAD NOT BEEN PART OF THE PLAN. WOODY WAS GOING TO drive from L.A. to San Francisco on Wednesday, take the actress to Sausalito on Thursday to see the director Dalton Lee, then go alone to Rosarita Bay, spending Friday night through Monday morning at Lyndon’s farm. Yet the moment he arrived at the Fairmont Hotel on Wednesday evening, things began to unravel. An assistant manager took Woody aside and told him there had been an “incident.” He bowed his head mournfully and said, “Actually, several incidents.”

  Ling Ling had assaulted two members of the hotel staff. Apparently her flight the day before from Hong Kong, despite the first-class passage, had been taxing on her, and she had lit upon the car driver and the bellhop and the desk clerk and the concierge at every turn with profane harangues. Yesterday evening, unhappy with the dinner wheeled into her suite, she had thrown a pot of coffee at the room service attendant. This morning, upset about being awakened prematurely, she had chased the hotel maid into the hallway and pushed over her cleaning cart and threatened to garrote her. This afternoon, there had been a fire. She had left a cigarette burning while taking a shower, and the cigarette had dropped off the ashtray, which she had placed on her bed, and set her sheets ablaze. Luckily the smoke detector had engaged and they’d been able to put out the fire before major damage had been done, but the fire alarms had been automatically tripped and the entire hotel had had to be evacuated.

  “We have her in another suite now,” the assistant manager said, “but we feel it’d be best for everyone concerned if the two of you would find different accommodations, somewhere other than the Fairmont.”

  Woody, tired from the long drive from L.A., still had his bags in his hands. “You want us to leave?” he asked.

  “We feel it’d be best.”

  “Right now?”

  “If you could.”

  Woody set down his satchels. One of those boxy things with rollers would have been more practical for travel, but these bags, made of the richest Italian leather, were so much more stylish. “I’m sorry for all the trouble,” he said in a calm, reasoned voice. The assistant manager was in his thirties, short, and rather dainty—maybe gay, a Napoleon complex, no doubt, someone quick to feel slighted. As Nietzsche had once said, to predict the behavior of ordinary people, you only had to assume that they would try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest expenditure of intelligence. “I’ll make sure there are no further incidents,” Woody told him. “I’ll take full responsibility for Ms. Yi from here on out. She’s quite famous, you know.”

  “I’ve never heard of her,” the assistant manager said.

  “No? Yi Ling Ling? She’s the queen of Hong Kong cinema.” This was a stretch, Woody had to admit, but the truth was unimportant in these moments of negotiation. The words themselves, what was being said, didn’t really matter. What counted was tone, modulation, the give and take in the power dynamic, the willingness to abdicate, when necessary, to a runty little homunculus like this assistant manager whose monthly salary, Woody was certain, didn’t come close to the cost of his Italian leather bags. “But like so many people of privilege,” Woody said, “she can be—well, let’s just come right out and say it—woefully inconsiderate. I hope the room service attendant wasn’t burned.”

  “Fortunately not.”

  “And the maid, she must have been pretty traumatized, I bet.” Woody flashed his teeth, a dazzling set of porcelain veneers (two thousand dollars a pop), in a practiced, clubby smile, a smile, he knew, that soothed and reassured, that in its affability and munificent wattage asked, Is this, is anything, so serious as to be insurmountable? Can’t we work this out? Aren’t we all in this together?

  “She’ll be all right,” the assistant manager said rather churlishly, not yet swayed.

  “I’d be happy to cover the damages to the suite. Don’t hesitate to put whatever amount you deem fit on my production company’s credit card. As for your staff…” Here Woody opened his suit jacket and pulled out his money clip from his pants pocket. The sight of the clip—twenty-four-karat solid gold, with the red Harvard seal that Woody partially concealed with his thumb, enough to suggest a modicum of modesty, as if he meant to cover it, not wanting to brag, but not enough for the shield and its motto, VE-RI-TAS, to be unrecognizable to anyone who looked—always impressed people. Whenever he took it out and began unplucking the clip from his thick fold of one-hundred-dollar bills, he could see people’s eyes grease in anticipation of a transaction, hallowed be thy name, mirabile visu. This simple exchange of legal tender for goods and services—was there anything more elemental, yet more beautiful? Money. No matter what anyone said, it was the answer to everything. When it came down to it, there was no human interaction that wasn’t, at its core, a transaction. “I’d like to give the attendant and maid a small token of appreciation for their patience,” Woody said, and flicked off two bills.

  “That’s not necessary,” the assistant manager said.

  “No, not necessary, but absolutely appropriate. And for you—” Flick, flick, flick. This was excessive, Woody knew. He couldn’t really afford such extravagance, but he couldn’t help himself, lost in the need to flaunt.

  The assistant manager discreetly raised his hand. Stop, he was gesturing. Stop? Woody couldn’t believe it. The little pissant was going to refuse him? But refuse him he did. “Could you leave the hotel within the hour?” he had the gall to say.

  Ling Ling, of course, threw a horrendous fit about the situation, screaming at Woody incoherently—not the greatest way to be introduced to each other, having only talked on the phone until then. She wasn’t exactly a pretty sight, either, nothing like the young, beautiful dynamo pictured in the dozens of Hong Kong action films she had made. But that had all been more than a decade ago. She was in her early forties now. Her face was bloated and wan, and she seemed weak, almost enfeebled, wheezing from the exertion of lifting her suitcases onto her bed. To top things off, she was drunk, completely soused. Instead of the svelte, glamorous, exquisitely fit kung fu goddess Woody had hoped to cast, he had before him a has-bee
n, a pathetic chain-smoking barfly whose time had come and long gone. Yi Ling Ling hadn’t had a decent part in years. No wonder she was here alone, without so much as a manager or a personal assistant, never mind an entourage, to keep her in check.

  Due to the inanities of the movie business, however, Woody was stuck with her. Feasibility reports, income-to-cost ratios, audience demographics, liquidation breakdowns, global rights analyses, distribution window schedules, premium tie-in lists, ancillary licenses, completion bonds, gap financing, pre-sale agreements, foreign sales matrices, deal point arrays—he had carefully produced a slew of spreadsheet models and business plans for every imaginable contingency, every scenario considered and provided for, in order to make this film as profitable and successful as possible for all parties concerned, and the lead actress he’d almost signed, Vivienne Cheung, had been perfect for this hip, edgy action movie set in the Bay Area, an adaptation of a Hong Kong film that had been a hit for Yi Ling Ling fifteen years ago. The problem was, everyone along the way had had an idea, a suggestion, a “note,” a teeny-weeny proposal for a teeny-weeny change in the script or talent or locale or period or genre. One teeny-weeny compromise had been tacked onto another, the biggest coming when Vivienne Cheung asked for too much money and a Chinese equity investor had an inspiration: Why not get Yi Ling Ling herself and make this a comeback vehicle for her? She’d once been a huge star overseas, and even after the extended slump in the Hong Kong film industry, her name still carried significant weight with foreign distributors and investors. It was a terrible idea, but to Woody’s befuddlement and frustration it caught hold, and pretty soon his original sure-bet, win-win project had gotten watered down to a dead-on-arrival dog that no one really wanted to do anymore, but to which everyone was committed, money on the table.

  Up to now, Woody had been making his money—a fair bit of money, if he did say so himself—as an intermediary between Hollywood and Asia. He negotiated the rights for American studios to remake films from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, and China. This movie, however, would be Woody’s first as an independent producer. He was tired of letting everyone else take the credit for his discoveries, while he got a mere finder’s fee. He wanted some input in how a movie was made. He wanted to go to festivals and premieres and stand with the stars and director. He wanted to take pride in something he’d created. He wanted to do his own remake. There was a lot riding on this project, a lot to fret about, a web of details and negotiations and transactions that required Woody’s constant management and vigilance, lest it fall apart.

  The fact was, this thing was still technically in development. He hadn’t gotten the true green light yet. The complicated international financing for the movie now hinged on Ling Ling and the director Dalton Lee, whose first indie feature, a small, quirky thriller about members of a Chinese-American gang in San Francisco, had made a splash at Sundance last year. The film, There Once Was a City, had been done on the cheap on digital video, but the action scenes had possessed an uncommon immediacy. Dalton Lee had shot right beside the actors with handheld cameras, the frame always moving, herky-jerky. With grainy flashbacks and rapid-fire jump cuts and bleached, harsh hues, everything felt frenetic and spontaneous, as if a live event were unfolding before the audience’s eyes, and the effect ratcheted up the film’s intensity, making it unpredictable and vivid. Dalton had emerged from the festival as the season’s new It Boy.

  In a coup, Woody had locked him into a development deal, a pay-or-play guarantee that was one percent of the production performance fee, meaning Woody was obliged to give him $100,000 to sit on his ass while everything was being finalized. But word was that Dalton wasn’t happy with the casting change, and Woody was supposed to take Ling Ling to meet him tomorrow. He needed Ling Ling to impress Dalton Lee. He needed her to be beautiful and charming and, above all else, sober.

  Woody called his assistant in L.A., who found them two rooms at the Palace Hotel. Ling Ling passed out as soon as they were ensconced upstairs, and she didn’t surface again until one-thirty the next afternoon. Their meeting with Dalton Lee in Sausalito was at five. She looked pale, hungover, but at least somewhat in control. She asked Woody to take her out to lunch, and he escorted her to a restaurant he knew in Union Square, three blocks away from the hotel (she insisted on taking a cab).

  At the restaurant, Ling Ling, wearing huge, imperviously dark sunglasses, immediately ordered a brandy and ginger ale in a collins glass, not too much ice, please.

  “I don’t think you should,” Woody told her.

  “You don’t think I should?” she said. She expelled a little chortle. “Oh, I most definitely think I should.”

  “It’s important we’re sharp for this meeting.”

  “Don’t concern yourself,” Ling Ling said. “Dalton Lee will love me. How could he not?”

  She asked for a second brandy and ginger ale before they even ordered their meal, with which she wanted a nice little Bordeaux. After they finished eating, she lit a cigarette, and the waiter hurried over to the table and explained that there was no smoking permitted in the restaurant.

  “Oh, I didn’t know,” Ling Ling said pleasantly in her melodious British accent—she had gone to boarding school in England—and, smiling at the waiter, continued to smoke.

  The waiter, holding an ashtray, kept waiting for her to extinguish her cigarette, and Ling Ling kept ignoring him, flicking ashes into her water glass, until finally she had had enough, she said, of his snotty attitude.

  “Do you know who I am?” Ling Ling asked the waiter.

  “No.”

  “I’m Yi Ling Ling,” she said.

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?” the waiter said.

  Ling Ling dropped her cigarette into her water glass, picked it up, and pitched the contents into the waiter’s face.

  They were asked to leave the restaurant.

  In the cab back to the hotel, Woody’s cell phone rang. “I got bad news,” his assistant, Roland, told him. “Dalton Lee’s canceled.”

  “What do you mean he’s canceled?”

  “He said he has a family emergency and needs to go out of town.”

  “That’s it? That’s all he said?”

  “That’s all his people said. He wants to postpone until ten a.m. Monday.”

  “The little chickenshit. He couldn’t even tell me directly. He has all my numbers. He better not be trying to wriggle out of this deal.” Woody took out his PDA. “Give me the rest of my messages,” he told Roland.

  “You don’t have any other messages.”

  “No messages?” Woody asked, feeling a pang of panic. There were always messages—messages from his accountant, his broker, his attorney, his unit production manager, messages from agents, producers, directors, managers, scriptwriters.

  “Everyone’s already left town for the weekend,” Roland said.

  “Oh, of course,” Woody said, breathing relief. “Labor Day.”

  “Did you know that Labor Day was originally meant to honor the workers ‘who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold’?” Roland said. “Isn’t that a beautiful, poetic line?”

  “I really don’t give you enough to do, do I?” Woody said.

  “Are you still going to your brother’s?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What are you going to do with Ling Ling, then?” Roland asked.

  IN THE END, WOODY had to bring her with him to Rosarita Bay. He was afraid to leave her in the city. God knew what kind of trouble she would get into on her own over the weekend, and he tried to convince himself that perhaps the delay was fortuitous. He might be able to dry her out a little, rein her in—a monumental delusion, he realized, when he returned to Lyndon’s house and saw his brother unconscious on the floor, his hands and ankles hog-tied.

  “What have you done?” he asked Ling Ling. “What is the matter with you?”

  She was sitting cross-legged in the second-floor hallway, a drink and
a cigarette in hand. He had left her for less than an hour, going into town to get some dinner for them.

  “He snuck up behind me,” she told him.

  “He’s my brother,” Woody said. “This is his house.”

  “Oh,” Ling Ling said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Are you insane? Are you completely off your rocker?”

  “Someone might be after me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Who?”

  “I think someone might have followed me from Hong Kong.”

  “Why in the world would anyone do that?”

  She began to speak, then stopped, as if she had lost her thought. “I don’t know.”

  “Wonderful,” Woody said. “Just dandy.”

  She had tied Lyndon with two electrical extension cords, and Woody began unwrapping them. “I’m taking you to the airport tomorrow,” he told her. “You can go back to Hong Kong. You’re a disaster. I’ve seen prima donnas before, but this is beyond the pale. No wonder you haven’t done anything in so long. Who would work with you? Don’t you get it? You exist on reputation alone, and it’s fading fast.”

  Wordlessly Ling Ling walked into one of the bedrooms and slammed the door.

  Woody sat Lyndon up and lightly slapped his face. “Hey, hey.”

  Lyndon came to and slowly focused on his brother. “What the fuck, Woody. What the fuck.”

  They went to the kitchen, where Lyndon grabbed a bag of frozen peas from the freezer, banged on it with the base of his palm, and pressed it against his jaw.

  “You have any whiskey?” Woody asked.

  Lyndon nodded toward a cupboard, and Woody pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two glasses that were relatively clean. There was half a bottle of X.O. on the counter, which Ling Ling must have already pilfered. Woody made a note to himself to hide it. He poured two drinks and handed one to Lyndon, and they sat down at the kitchen table.